Photo Exhibition Concrete Human: Making Evidence Visible

Three people stand behind a window, two adults and a child with curly hair. The room behind them is dark, curtains frame the image. They’re looking outside, in different directions. You don’t need to read minds to recognise the mood of the three. Is the scene staged? That remains the artist’s secret. This opening image of the exhibition Concrete Human, which contains 36 photographs and 22 poems, symbolically shows people in spaces that clearly aren’t good for them. The pictures show nothing spectacular, just what we fail to see every day.

It happens more often and more unconsciously than we would admit to ourselves: you enter a room and your nervous system has already evaluated it in every dimension before your gaze has even reached the ceiling lamp. Light, air, material and sound deliver hundreds of inputs that are processed in milliseconds. The result is a state, not an opinion about the quality of the room. Either your body relaxes or it ramps up. Everybody knows this.

The science on it has existed for decades. Office workers with a window sleep 46 minutes longer than those without (Boubekri et al., 2014, Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine), in housing estates with vegetation violent crime drops by 52 percent (Kuo & Sullivan, 2001, Environment and Behavior). Around 100,000 Europeans died in 2012 from indoor air pollution (WHO Europe, 2012). When the data is there but the construction industry continues to build as before, it gets stuck either at accessibility or at awareness. Cost isn’t the issue, I’ve worked through that in other essays. In my view, what’s missing is a medium or a consulting approach that makes the research accessible and brings it into awareness.

What we see at this point is that reports are not enough. The data from the studies is abstract and for architects hard to picture and hard to implement. You can read a study and understand it, but if nothing further happens and nobody is confronted with it, nothing will develop from it. So our idea was: this topic has to be visualised on a completely different level. That’s why we initiated a photographic exhibition.

Through a private real estate project I met a very capable and, above all, empathic architect. Through him an idea developed that grew more far-reaching over time. Out of our conversations came a meeting with the Norwegian photographer André Clemetsen at an architecture conference in Oslo. André is a sought-after portrait photographer and was enthusiastic about the idea of photographing people in badly designed urban spaces and making visible what happens in and around buildings to the people inside. At first it wasn’t about science, just observation. The project was born.

It became 36 photographs and 22 poems, which we published in a vivid online exhibition.

We were all extremely curious about how you show large-format photography, images that really need to hang on a wall to work, online in a way that makes them work. The result can certainly hold up and differs substantially from conventional presentations of photography on websites. The exhibition has 22 rooms in fullscreen cinema mode, at the start there’s a breathing overlay inviting the viewer to sit comfortably, breathe slowly and let the images come. The images come to the viewer, not the other way around. There is no scrolling, no clicking, no museum interface. I had never done anything like this, and it was really a lot of fun.

Photography that shows people in rooms or in the context of the built environment is of course never neutral. What André does is artistically deliberate: He captures a mood and stages it. Dorothea Lange did that in the 1930s with poverty. I’m a big fan of hers: At a time when digital photography and post-processing didn’t yet exist, she showed what was really there, and much more. She shows what others miss, and that’s why the images are so outstanding and emotional.

The topic found me over another route. I’ve built houses and furnished offices, and in doing so I got everything wrong that can be gotten wrong. Like an experiment where I wanted to find out what happens when you mix exuberant consumer joy with interior-design amateurism: buy expensive furniture, assemble it clumsily and be proud of it on top of that. I failed and a lack of atmosphere sent me the bill. It’s the same everywhere: You walk into one room and want to be there, you walk into another and have only one thought: out of here. At some point I started to understand this. Not as an architect, but as someone who lives in these spaces and has wasted enough money on interior furnishings.

Alongside all of this I’ve been occupied with consciousness for decades, for example with Sri Aurobindo’s “The Adventure of Consciousness”. Consciousness happens inside. A stable inner state makes the outer world less important, but that state isn’t untouchable. A room can strengthen or weaken it, can work with you or against you. Most of the time you don’t notice what’s happening. It takes a while until consciousness finds the right words.

As a consultant I tend to work on the conceptual and strategic tasks in projects. When AI grew up, I learned to evaluate scientific research data-based through data analysis and algorithm-excess. Since then I’ve been working on the bridges between the hard facts of research and what the person should feel, whether weighed down, moved, enthused or motivated. The main task is to find the right data for the respective question and then draw the right conclusions.

Through the project I got to know Daiana Zamler, architect and PhD researcher on the impact of built spaces, and Ola Elvestuen, the former Norwegian environment minister. They are different people with the same unease: We know what rooms do to people and yet we build as if we didn’t.

We spend 90 percent of our lives inside buildings. The construction industry thinks in square meters and returns. The person inside gets reduced to a usage assumption. Concrete Human is meant to express this through visual confrontation. One of my hopes is that someone stands in front of one of these images, feels the pressure the room exerts on the person inside and starts to see their own four walls differently.